After a week away in the sun, I return to you ready to comment on the state of Dartmouth's snowy sports (hint: they are pretty good). The ski team is still undefeated, and won the Eastern Intercollegiate Ski Association (EISA for all you college ski buffs) for the first time in 25 years, and is peaking at just the right time for the NCAA championships next week.
As expected, the men's hockey team, after hovering around .500 most of the year, has won its last four games, seven of their last eight, and have a 10-1-2 record in their last 13 contests. Peaking at the right time is probably the right term to describe their performance as well, allowing a share of their first Ivy League title since 1980. Oddly, even though the Ivy League does not actually exist in hockey, there is an Ivy League champion -- the team with the best head-to-head record among the six Ivies with hockey teams.
The women's hockey team is hotter than the men, but they are not exactly peaking considering they have been on a tear all season. Their 11 straight wins, and only one loss since Nov. 11 are two very impressive statistics. Maybe even more impressive is the Big Green's average of 4.29 goals per game compared to its 1.55 goals against average. In conference play, the difference is even more remarkable: 4.77 versus 1.27.
But now I have given you too many hard facts. On to the useless trivia my loyal readers (both of you) expect from me. I began to think it would be interesting to study the geographic concentration of our winter athletic teams, to see if their members were from locations as varied as the student body.
I picked six teams: men's and women's basketball, men's and women's hockey, and men's and women's skiing (I separated the two to make the numbers more manageable). The team with the greatest number of states (and Canadian provinces) represented was the men's skiing team, who also had the greatest number of members (35). The team is made up of members from 16 different states and one Canadian province. This includes two members from both Oregon and New York, and one of each from the skiing hotbeds of Washington and Minnesota. The best-represented states are both close by, as Vermont and New Hampshire each had four male skiers competing for Dartmouth. The next two states on the list were Colorado and Alaska, slightly farther away.
The women's hockey team features a player from the basketball hotbed of Kentucky, while neither basketball team features a member from the Bluegrass State. Both hockey teams are dominated by Canadians, the women's team featuring 10 of our neighbors from the north (six from Ontario, four from Alberta) and the men's team featuring 11 (six from Alberta, three from Ontario and two from British Columbia). The women's team features an equal number of Canadians and Americans (10), while the men's team features 13 Americans and only 11 Canadians. There is only one Canadian for the entire ski team, and none at all who compete for the Big Green in basketball (not surprising for a country whose only real asset to basketball has been Steve Nash, and he was born in South Africa).
The men's hockey team does not have a single player from south of the Mason-Dixon line, though the women's team has two. In contrast, four of 10 women's basketball players are from Texas, and two more are from elsewhere in the South. The state with the most players on the men's basketball team is Ohio (three), but is closely followed by Texas, Tennessee and Colorado, with two players each. Between these six teams, there are only two athletes from California, our nation's largest state in terms of population, but 12 from Vermont, the second smallest (behind Wyoming, which is represented as well).
Maybe it's the geography student in me, but I find this all quite interesting. Due to Dartmouth's small size and rural location, coaches need to scour all corners of the country to uncover talent in whatever sport they are coaching. Whether it's Alaska (home to five skiers) or Wisconsin (three skiers and a hockey player), winter athletes, as it turns out, come from the same places as the rest of us (unless you are from Florida, in which case, you're out of luck).
